RIFLES

I see that my old home town has a squirrel problem. Darn squirrels. My mother's family had an active hatred for them. I don't know why. The old house had 5 doors to the outside and by every one there was a rifle. When I visited and stayed with one of my uncles he had rifles by the front and back door. This was the uncle who despised bow hunters. The first time I visited his new house outside of Carlisle there was a leg sticking up out of the ground out back by the river. A bow hunter had put an arrow in a deer but didn't follow it up and so the deer suffered to death on my uncle's land. His neighbor had a machine for digging holes, plowing snow, defeating Martians and so on but the water table is so high they couldn't get the entire deer under ground. Some remained above.

We went to his 80th birthday party and it was a family reunion. All the brothers were there, and their sister and an awful lot of their kids (pushing 50) were there with their kids. The rifles were not in evidence. I think his daughters hid them for the 2 day party since there were an infinite number of little kids dashing around and rifles are damned near irresistible.

On my first ship we had a captain. He kept an M14 on the bridge with 5 or 6 fully loaded magazines and he would step out on the expanisve bridge wing to shoot sea snakes. National Geographic had a story about how sea snakes have no natural predators. We sent them a picture of Captain Julian shooting them. One of the perks of being Officer of the Deck was taking the rifle out and shooting sea snakes which the Persian Gulf had in great abundance. Any job where shooting a rifle is a perk is a damned good job.